How to be more efficient and focused using Kanban

Everyone knows that time is money (and vice versa). They also know that quality is better than quantity, or at least they are supposed to!

Wouldn’t I be great if there was a set of business practices that could encompass and implement these concepts in an easy and effective way? Oh wait, there is! It’s called Kanban! It was first used by the Toyota company back in the 1950’s to make their line workers more productive.

It encompasses the principle of working smarter instead of working harder. So how exactly can you use this in your favor to make your business more efficient and focused using Kanban?

Make your company more efficient and focused using Kanban!

The first thing you need to keep in mind is: you must have flexibility in planning. You can make your team more focused using Kanban by eliminating all unnecessary work and only focusing on the activities that are actively progress.

This includes using a backlog to keep the most relevant and top priority tasks on top so your team can focus their attention and resources on them!

Any of the micromanaging or schedule changing can take place underneath the top item on the backlog thus no time is wasted on projects that are not a priority.

Next, you will want to minimize your work cycle time. Your work cycle is the amount of time it takes one specific task to go through the entire workflow.

Hiring and training employees with a myriad of skill sets may help you speed it up – if your team members know how to handle more than one type of task, the work is bound to be finished sooner than if only one or two employees specialize in one specific skill.

Also, having no more than one team member responsible for a specific type of task may cause your process to slow down or even create bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks are the activities that are slowing down your process – Kanban allows you to easy visualize all your tasks, making it a lot easier to identify whether a certain phase (or person) is causing tasks to stall.

While it’s nice to have a diverse team who is flexible in many skill sets, that does not mean you should participate in multi-tasking. Even though multitasking seems like a great thing in theory, it actually tends to scatter your team’s productivity.

Have your team working together to finish tasks quickly and efficiently – one task at a time – in order do accomplish more in a shorter amount of time by using extreme focus.

This limitation of focusing on one task at a time is known by the name of work in progress limit – it helps you make sure people are not wasting time juggling multiple tasks when they could easily finish tasks a lot faster if they were doing one thing at a time. Way to increase productivity and be more focused using Kanban, isn’t it?

Another great way to increase focus is to work visually on improvement. This can be done with the help of charts and graphics that clearly demonstrate your workflow issues, helping your team work together in order to diminish their impact or even eliminate them.

Finally, practicing a system of continuous delivery is a sure way to make your products competitive and in high demand. When your customers are able to see that you are delivering high quality services at a rapid pace, they’re going to be more confident on your company and increase the possibility of buying from you. You can achieve this by optimizing your workflow to accommodate varied deadlines.

These incredible benefits are just an example of how you keep your team more productive and focused using Kanban. It doesn’t matter whether you decide to start using a physical Kanban or an online one, Kanban is great to improve productivity (however, if you go for the online alternative, give Pipefy a try!).

Make your team more efficient and focused with Pipefy!

Pipefy is an intuitive, simple to use, workflow software. We allow businesses to run all their processes in a single platform, ensuring efficiency and solid execution.

Pipefy works as an online Kanban system where tasks move laterally through the multiple phases of your process. Each of your process’ phases can have its own set of work rules, triggers and if needed, a designated owner.

Don’t lose any more time, try Pipefy!

Let us help you grow your business.

Our sales team can help simplify your operations and get set up with the right solution to meet your business needs.

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Written by
Isabelle Salemme, Product content manager at Pipefy. She uses her extensive Pipefy knowledge to write informative pieces teaching users to make the best of Pipefy.
Besides being responsible for all product-related content, she's an avid reader, a coffee lover and a professional photographer.